Google's One-Gender-Fits-All T-Shirts Don't Fit

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Google's One-Gender-Fits-All T-Shirts Don't Fit

Esther Dyson

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Google I/O hadn't even started when critics began unloading on how the developer conference was being run. A forward-thinking Google panel on how to get more women in tech became a flashpoint for whether the t-shirts handed out at Google I/O are patriarchal.

"They gave me a t-shirt and it's a size small, men's," said Alex Maier, a community manager and heavy user of Google's products, during a Q&A session with the panel. "That makes me feel unwelcome. I don't want to make this a big issue or confrontational thing.... But the thing is, I show up, and I want my shirt, and I don't want to be told that I can sleep in it."

What, Maier asked, was Google going to do about its one-gender-fits-all clothes in the future, given that women at Google I/O are already vastly outnumbered and prone to feeling excluded?

The audience of roughly 100 women applauded the question exuberantly.

Google's response was swift. "I think it's great feedback," senior vice president and panelist Susan Wojcicki said moments later. "We'll communicate it – and make sure we have women's t-shirts."

Then the crowd really applauded. Google I/O hadn't even begun, and they'd already extracted a meaningful, if small, concession from one of the world's most powerful corporations.

Finding ways to empower women was precisely the point of the "Women Techmakers" event, which featured, in addition to sumptuous shrimp and plenty of wine, five top Google executives, including Wojcicki and advanced products VP Megan Smith. Why, panelists wondered, had women fallen from a peak of nearly 38 percent of information technology graduates, which they are believed to have hit in 1985, to levels closer to 28 percent? And, more to the point, what should be done about it?

Those questions have come to the foreground in Silicon Valley in recent months, thanks in part to venture capitalist Ellen Pao's allegations of gender discrimination at the prominent venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and also thanks to Sheryl Sandberg's ascension as Facebook's first female board member. But tech's gender divide was increasingly prominent even before all that. Google, Microsoft, Facebook and other tech companies banded together this past November to help launch Sit With Me, a campaign to encourage women in tech to share their stories and encourage one another.

Google's gathering marked one of the most prominent attempts yet to encourage a dialog around the issue. While advocacy groups like Women 2.0 and Double X Tech have convened their own events, Women Techmakers marked a rare occasion when a major tech company had pushed the issue to the forefront at one of its own big conferences. Among the women invited to the event, Maier included, the overture was warmly received.

Google executives on the panel eagerly played the company's efforts to accommodate women. Smith pointed to Google's 19 employee resource groups, which include, alongside groups for "Gayglers" and Filipino Googlers, groups for women and women engineers. Others on the panel cited instances in which Wojcicki and other powerful women within the company had provided mentoring and helped them win promotions. Google also has extensive scholarship and recruiting programs aimed at women, according to Smith, and launched an internal program to encourage more women to nominate themselves for raises.

Still, opening a dialog about women in tech opens Google to criticism even as it offers opportunities for good public relations. The t-shirt question was evidence of that, as was another question about hiring.

"I am a software engineer and I interviewed at Google," one woman told the panel. "And I was interviewed by all men. I thought it would have been advantageous for both sides to have at least one woman interview me."

Google's answer, alas, was not very satisfying. The company used to have a "hard and fast rule" that all woman candidates would be interviewed by at lease one woman, said engineering director Anna Patterson. But during periods of "high velocity" hiring, that requirement is dropped.

It seems that not all gender issues are as easily resolved as t-shirt sizes.